xviii A FAMILIAR PREFACE

deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond
the bounds of our normal sensibility—innocently
enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who
raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural
conversation—but still we have to do that. And
surely this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the
writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration,
losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end
coming to despise truth itself as something too cold,
too blunt for his purpose—as, in fact, not good enough
for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the
descent is easy to snivelling and giggles.

These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't,
in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his
own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all
can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly
and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world
where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the
experience of imagined adventures, there are no police-
men, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of
opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is
going to say Nay to his temptations if not his con-
science?

And besides—this, remember, is the place and the
moment of perfectly open talk—I think that all
ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward
on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intel-
lectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and
even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can
hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the worse
for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such
ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad
presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's
art, to try for other means, for other ways of affirming
this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work? To try